INSULTED BY A CLOSED BODEGA tests H.I.V.-positive when she goes to the hospital to have a baby, and no one knows how many men would test posi- tive if there were a way to get them to the hospital, any more than anyone knows how many men would test posi- tive for crack or heroin or any of the . kn " dball " street mIxtures own as spee s. The facts, of course, are misleading. They do not account for thousands of illegal immigrants; they do not distin- guish between black, white, and Indian " H . ." ( h 1 . d " IspanlCS w 0 are Iste as non- white" in the census) or, for that matter, between "Hispanics" and "Latinos," who mayor may not have Spanish as their first language. They do not distin- guish between the Dominican dealers and the Jamaican posses who come to the Bronx for a couple of years and split with their drug money and the Puerto Rican mothers and grandmothers who appear at three in the afternoon, when school lets ou t, to chase those dealers off the street so the children can play. The facts are stereotypes of race and class and culture-much more than John Ahearn's statues were stereo- types-which is why people who thought the statues should stay worry about what it means about "stereotypes" when poor people give something away for nothing in return. John wants to re- place the statues, but the city might have to sell Raymond, Corey, and Daleesha to pay for the bronze and the foundry, and it is not certain now that John (or art or the neighbors) would survive the process of choosing the subjects of "correct" representation under the scrutiny of his community board, the police, the city bureaucracy, the guys at the pizzeria, and the woman who stood at the traffic triangle stop- ping traffic last fall to ask people if Corey, shirtless and a little flabby, was the "representation" they wanted. J OHN AHEARN is not the first New York artist to get caught up in argu- ments about representation. The year of the South Bronx bronzes was also the year that Jenny Marketou, a photogra- pher with the job of decorating a QIeens subway station, was accused of racism for taking pictures of Greek-Americans- she was Greek-instead of African- Americans and the muralist Richard Haas, who had already decorated fifteen New York City walls, was asked to re- place a panel in a series of reliefs on the history of immigration to New York. Haas had made the panels for the Baxter Street wall of a new city jail, on White Street. They were up for two years, and no one complained, but then a guard who had just been transferred from the prison on Rikers Island saw them, and told some friends at the Department of Correction Hispanic Society that what he took to be the "Hispanic" pane] did not show "positive values," and after that a lot of people did complain. They said they didn't like the sign "Bodegà' on a store on the panel, and they didn't like the fact that the bodega was closed- they thought it looked like "Hispanic failure," though Haas thought it looked like "Sunday"-and they didn't like the image of a junked car or of a woman with a bare midriff or of a man sleeping on the sidewalk. They thought the woman was a hooker and the man was drunk, and they were not much com- forted or appeased when Haas said that the woman was based on a pretty blonde he had once seen in a book, roller-skat- ing in Central Park, and that the man was homeless, and was there to "raise consciousness" in people walking by. Luis Cancel, the new commissioner of Cultural Affairs-and a Hispanic and an artist himself-called Haas then and told ,d ' /, . 83 him "the process would continue." No one knew exactly how the process would continue, though people at Cul- tural Affairs talked about "the Phoe- nix precedent," which had to do with arguments about a piece of public art in Phoenix, and with how Phoenix settled those arguments. The "commu- nity" met, and friends of the artist's-his "advocates"-came to the meeting, and everyone testified, and then an "im- partial jury" decided what the artist should do. It was not a precedent that appealed to Haas, who says he preferred the kind of precedent set by Solomon on another one of his jailhouse panels-the mother who loved the baby most let go. He let go. He got together with six Hispanic leaders-they met in the Gauguin Room at Cultural Affairs, which was probably not the best room for talking about stereotypes. He had offered to h " b d "" k " c ange 0 ega to supermar et or "superette" or something else agreeable to them, but the leaders said no, "super- market" was not enough, and eventually Haas painted out the panel, at his own expense. He offered to redo the panel. He asked for pictures of "appropriate" Hispanic images to consider, but he said he would refuse to submit his changes for "community" approval. He said that L ...e' .... - ' /"' , ' -.... f - ...,. - 'You needn't feel guilty. You earned the fortune you inherited by giving her great happiness while she was alive"